A friend was telling me about his hunt for a piece of land. This was before the internet, so he contacted a real estate agent for possibilities.
"I want something remote, with a waterfall."
The agent had some ideas, and my friend went to check them out. One was in New York with a crashing waterfall,
chilly with its recent freedom from being snowpack. He bought it.
I thought about the water that spilled over the rocks. On any given day, the droplets changed. None of them had any awareness of having been purchased. They danced, beholden to no one. Propriety had no meaning.
Yet every time he drove to the mountains, he could plunge into the pool beneath, pretending that he owned this oasis of nature. Legal documents backed it
up.
Moat of us consider our bodies to be our own. With no effort on our part, these magnificent machines pump blood, digest lunch, bend to our will, and report back about the surroundings we live in. It makes sense to call them ours. And yet.
There is a flow of life that pours into and through our limbs, with no beckoning from us. It certainly looks like strength comes from and depends on us. Similarly, our ideas spring forth from
our own effort.
Maybe. Maybe not.
"If we believed that--as is truly the case--everything good and true comes from the Lord and everything evil and false comes from hell, then we would not claim the goodness as our own and make it self-serving or claim the evil as our own and make ourselves guilty of it." Divine Providence 320, Emanuel Swedenborg